Startup Wants To Put 64-Cores In Your Smartphone

angry tapir writes "Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets. The RISC-based processor is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip, and can sit alongside CPUs to provide real-time execution of diverse applications. Epiphany chips are currently scalable up to 64 cores in smartphones and up to 4,000 cores in servers. The processor can accelerate tasks like hand gesture recognition, face matching or face tracking, but is not designed to be a full-fledged CPU."

Comments

a toaster oven

[roman_mir]

I wonder what good it would do them if they stick their toaster oven into my Nokia 6303c?

Re:a toaster oven

[syousef]

I wonder what good it would do them if they stick their toaster oven into my Nokia 6303c?

You have 64 cores. That's gonna run much hotter than a toaster oven....though probably not for long enough to make toast.

Re:a toaster oven

[timeOday]

Nah, the total number of transistors in those 64 cores is probably a small fraction of the transistors in one modern CPU - more like stream processing units in a GPU (a GPU has several hundred).

Modern CPUs use huge numbers of transistors for small increases in speed, so there's no question such a chip would be much more efficient for tasks that fit it - again, like GPUs.

Re:a toaster oven

[drewm1980]

They are targeting 1 Watt mobile applications to start with. For reference, a high-end gpu these days is ballpark 500W.

Re:a toaster oven

[bondsbw]

Architecture doesn't really matter. It only matters how many transistors and electrical components are in use at once. Considering the efficiency of modern CPUs in pipelining and branch prediction (and probably even better stuff since the last time I've heavily studied CPU architecture), I'd venture to guess that the number of transistors active at any moment is reasonably close to the number of transistors available.

Re:a toaster oven

[Jeremy Erwin]

This article implies that the 16 core adapteva system on a chip has 40 million transistors-- slightly less than an Atom.

The RV870 has 2.2 billion transistors, not all of which are used for the chip's 1600 stream processors.

Um...why?

[drb226]

At some point you do need things to be performed in sequence. Performing a bajillion parallel operations can only get you so far. Can the simple tasks required of a smartphone (e.g. AngryBirds) really benefit from that many cores?

Re:Um...why?

[Darinbob]

Because marketing thinks that if they have N cores it will sell better than a phone with only N-1 cores. And they're probably right.

Re:Um...why?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Hey, it works with digital cameras and megapixels. Worked with processors and mega/giga hertz for a loooong time.

Re:Um...why?

[RightwingNutjob]

Video processing can (depending on what you're doing) be very parallel. So can some kinds of data compression. The real question is gonna be in terms of power. Are 64 mostly-idle cores going to consume less power than one or two fully loaded cores multiplexing those same tasks.

Re:Um...why?

[Nikker]

I actually beg to differ. On smartphones or low powered devices breaking it down to smaller physical processors is likely the most elegant and efficient route. Each aspect of the smartphone OS is compartmentalized. Email is scheduled to run at a specific interval, web browser is refreshing at a different interval all serial on their own in many cases but when it comes to sharing with other processes not very friendly. Then you have 3rd party apps that are all over the board. I think being able to assign specific tasks to dedicated units would help as far as context switching as well as data protection and sandboxing. From the users prospective each app can run smoothly and if the odd one craps out then the OS can just knock out the CPU and dump a report.

I doubt the processors they are talking about have much to them as to consider them CPU's but as we see with the trend of multiple low power cores even scaling to 4 or 8 would likely handle a decent work load equivalent to a few atom procs (enough for a presentation and a web browser) in your pocket at decent resolutions of 1080p minimum.

Re:I'm impressed

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Yeah. With that many cores, you could have TWO websites that use Flash open at the same time!

Re:I'm impressed

[Penguinisto]

Only question is, how much can you burden each core?

After all, you could have a bajillion cores in a chip, but if each core in it can only handle one-bajillionth the load of a single-core x86 or PPC chip, then where's the advantage?

Any tech that has testimonials

[mrmeval]

Smells of infomercials and burned popcorn.

zzzzzzzz

[O('_')O_Bush]

TFA is so chalk full of buzzwords and unsubstantiated claims that I can't help but call this a slashvertisement.

Not General Purpose

[adisakp]

FTA: However, we do not have a memory management unit, so we can not act as a host for operating systems such as standard Linux or Windows.

In other words, they either access fixed shared memory pool or they have some directly mapped memory on each core or both.

These are more like a different take on the SPU cores in a CELL (PS3) processor than a traditional multicore CPU.

Re:I'm impressed

[Rockoon]

Most parallel problems can be defined in terms that require no locks within the inner loops, such as the class of problems mentioned in the grandparent (image recognition..)

I find that people that dont know shit about algorithms always think that the "hard" parts of parallel strategies somehow magically apply to most highly parallel problems... which is stupid.. but there you are.

Don't bother replying until you have mastered a functional language to the point where the reason I am asking you to master one dawns on you.